My dead dad’s journal
seanblanda.com
seanblanda.com
I was really torn about reading it at first, but he was the type of person who wanted to go ahead of the pack and clear the path for others. His journal was the last way for him to do that.
He was older than me and, reading it years after his death, it's shocking to see the differences between our lives at the same ages. He always seemed older and wiser, but now -- having just turned the age he was when he died -- I realize why he felt so lost and lonely. Being an adult in your mid-twenties is difficult. I have it easy, and I'm having a hard time. Throw in years of battling addiction and no college education, and you can't help but feel the entire world is against you.
Losing an older sibling is a strange experience. The longer you go without them, the smaller the age gap between you becomes. Eventually, you're older than they will ever be -- I haven't reached that point yet but just thinking about it puts a lump in my throat.
I've considered publishing bits and pieces of his story on a blog, or in a book, someday. Anything that could help people in his (or my) situation feel less alone. Although, I don't think it would be much help considering his story ended.
Not sure why I posted this comment. There's not much substance here other than evidence of another touched soul.
Unfortunately when she died of cancer, she was in complete denial. Right to the bitter end it was "I'll get better". She refused to write down anything, or records little videos for her newborn to have when he was older. It felt like communicating "from beyond the grave", as it were, and she just couldn't do it. It was an admission of her impending death. She just wanted to raise him and one day tell him about her fight with cancer.
My mother passed away at 59. She was healthy, and thought she had decades to live. Then she got sick, and thought she had years. Few months later, we had a call on our way to the hospital, she was dead.
I didn't have the greatest relationship with my mother and the disease didn't allow us to do more than scratch the surface. She wasn't an open person but I know her mind was rich. She left with it and nobody will ever be able to get the full picture. Maybe that's what she wanted, but almost a year later I know something will still be missing inside me.
A lot of people here are entrepreneurs and I think a common goal is to leave our trace in this world, and make our temporary stay less temporary. We tend to forget that everything is temporary and always think we have time, but really, we don't.
This feeling first created within me a constant feeling of rush and stress, still present, but is evolving in a urge to focus on what is truly essential to me.
I, for some strange/personal reasons struggle to write what's in my head. My thoughts are very disorganized and always feel what's on the paper doesn't reflect the original idea. If you have felt in a similar way, I am very interested in hearing stories on how you overcame this.
I believe we all have a treasure to share, maybe not to the world, but to a few people to who we matter.
> I, for some strange/personal reasons struggle to write what's in my head.
I don’t think that’s strange at all. Most of us can use language to get by through daily live, but to put to words our own thoughts in a way that other’s can read them later is really difficult.
> If you have felt in a similar way, I am very interested in hearing stories on how you overcame this.
I recognise this. For me writing small self-contained fragments is a good way to get started. Tweets are too small. But essays are too big.
The problem with writing your own thoughts is that in your mind everything’s connected: the challenge is to cut some connections and make a bit of text that can stand on its own two feet. And then learn to enjoy the things that make text work, the rhythm, the tone, the choice of words.
Like with any creative endeavour, you need to build up a muscle to do it. I think the actual platform doesn’t matter at all. It could be a paper notebook or a blogging platform. Whatever works for you. If you can write a small 300 word text every week that’s already amazing. I would just start with the first thought that comes into your mind. And not worry about the coherence between the different texts. After a year you’ll have 50 short texts and a better intuition on how to make writing work for you. If you’re interested in writing longer pieces then, you’ll also have a better feel for which subjects lend themselves to it.
That’s how it works for me at least. Before I wrote my first book, I spent a long time blogging. It helped me to stop trying to connect all my thoughts together in a big scheme. I loved the freedom of writing small self-contained texts that didn’t need to relate exactly to the previous ones. It also helped me explore a variety of themes. I’m looking forward to take up blogging again, as I know I have a lot of topics I’m interested in and it’s only through writing with that variety that I can get a clearer focus for my next project.
> I believe we all have a treasure to share, maybe not to the world, but to a few people to who we matter.
So true. Although we might end up sharing it in other ways than written words. But I feel learning to write also helps you think and express yourself at other moments in your live.
I logged into HN after a year to respond to this prompt. I've dealt with this too, and some things did help quite a lot.
1. Orwell wrote this about choosing words, which I found in a similarly excellent LessWrong article[1]: "What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations."
2. It also gave me great relief to find that Edsger Dijkstra, one of the greats of Computer Science, wrote slowly in order to write elegantly and correctly: Whether written using a fountain pen or typewriter, Dijkstra’s technical reports were composed at a speed of around three words per minute(!!). “The rest of the time,” he remarked, “is taken up by thinking.”
3. Try ditching full sentences. Write phrases. Make some words in the sentences BIG FOR EMPHASIS. Do whatever styling or structuring that corresponds to the feeling in your mind. Your notes are for you, they only need to make sense for you.
4. Even if what's on the paper doesn't reflect the original idea, write it down regardless. Even if it doesn't do your original thought justice, the written version will persist into the future while the thought in your head will fade, losing much or all of its clarity. That written version will continue to be useful. The more you practice this habit of writing, the better you will get at representing your own thoughts. In time, you will be able to consistently write notes that are passably good. Keep at it. This is the most important thing.
5. The last and yes the least, I'd suggest experimenting with tools. Google Keep is garbage as a platform for creating and organizing your notes. I switched to Notion earlier this year, and it was a paradigm shift. Through Notion, I found this nice site called Excalidraw where you can draw things online. When it comes to writing on phone, I found that I only like to see my current sentence when I'm writing. So I made a solo group on Whatsapp, and write my notes there. It really makes a difference.
[1] https://www.readthesequences.com/Rationality-And-The-English...
I just saw your reply and really appreciate you took the time to write it.
My experience with addicts is that they are often self aware. Their appearance and circumstance might suggest otherwise. It's very easy to relegate these people to some category of cognitive failure.
Unfortunately it seems to me that addiction tends to defeat good cognition, awareness, intention, all the rest of the apparent defences – it isn't a disease of stupidity or inferiority.
> It was Jekyll talking to Hyde. Bruce Banner talking to the Hulk. And, in honor of my dad I feel I must also include: It’s Data talking to Lore.
I love it.
That was a nice read. I like to be reminded of how messy life can be and at the same time how close death is. We're all on borrowed time. Reading about dads struggling from the perspective of their children is also a uniquely motivating thing. I hope my kids don't end up reading through my journals trying to get to know me after losing me unexpectedly.
Sadly this is true for so many things -- depression, ADHD, extreme anxiety. And yet for the most part, society does not understand. Instead, people aren't trying hard enough, or they're not letting things make them happy, or they're lazy, or are procrastinating.
If only more people realized that no amount of awareness or intelligence can overcome some of these issues without help from others -- be it friends, family, medical professionals, or strangers -- perhaps the world would be a better place.
It’s a sign of lack of experience, but you also can’t experience even 1% of everything so are you just need to learn that when a lot of people are doing something that doesn’t make sense to you and it makes you think they’re dumb, it just means that you just don’t have the tools to figure out why yet. Of course, it also doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re right either.
That's easy to see in other people talking about other people, and difficult to see in yourself talking about other people.
TFA is not really about that.
TFA is about one man who exhibited two distinct personas. One was loving and kind, the other was tormented and self-destructive. He left a diary as the only way he could find to present his better self to his family, free from the interference of the destructive aspects of his persona/s.
It is tempting to wonder which persona is the "real" one, which leads to attempts to resolve or cure or purify the self, either by ones self or by others. But that assumes there is such a thing as a "real" self. That's a common paradigm in western cultures, particularly Hollywood films, and less common in other parts of the world, particularly easter cultures.
What if the self is not singular, but a fluid network of identities?
https://aeon.co/essays/the-self-is-not-singular-but-a-fluid-...
Identity is a socially constructed fiction that we are bound to via continuous environmental reinforcement. We impose identities on each other as a fundamental precept of social reality. It's somewhere in the middle of our existential stack, biochemistry being the "hardware" and what one does with one's life the being the "apps".
Just like migrating a computer from one operating system to a vastly different one means you won't be able to run the same apps out of the box, changing our idea of the "self" would make a lot of the things we currently do become meaningless, and we would have to explicitly put some effort into giving them new meaning if we wanna keep them (most meaning is inherited). Just like some people are enthusiastic about fine tuning their Unix box or their muscle car, some try to remedy issues that they find in their identities and meanings. (Which is highly undesirable to the status quo, and a major purpose of all the political noise in the media is to crowd out thinking that may lead to this sort of activity.)
Since the self is self-reinforcing, reforms to our model of identity generally come from outside our rational awareness. (See e.g. Jungian "shadow self".) Historically, art and culture, being collective phenomena, have acted as such a reservoir of "awareness transcending the self". Nowadays we also have behavioral targeting - social network algorithms can be scarily accurate at precipitating self-reflection. And unlike culture, which is local, participatory, and slow, big data is global, opaque, and fast. (Just the other day, I laughed my ass off when I realized that a popular recommender algo had deduced my life situation from my "completely random" "fuck the algo" actions on the platform, and started promoting exactly the kind of content that would push my buttons, even though all I ever post on that platform is complete and utter nonsense. We humans are predictable - even from metadata if the scale is large enough.)
It is quite easy to become trapped in the self: remain high-functioning while acting out a role that you feel to be fundamentally contradictory with some sort of "more real, inner self" that you identify with more intentionally. In the general case, we don't have the cognitive tools to become aware that both selves are equally fictitious. This desperate and uninformed struggle towards a "true self" can manifest as different compensatory drives and mechanisms that can override our (self-circumscribed) willpower and make us destructive of self and others.
Worse, in many environments, a certain degree of destructiveness is necessary for others to legitimize you as a self in the first place! Shout out to everyone who never wanted anything to do with any of that but are now stuck being some random person they barely recognize. And a dose of your preferred self-medication, on the house. Stay strong friends, Skynet is coming to free us all. Any day now
>Unfortunately society does not understand..
Both statements are misleading. The issue is not what the addict or society understands.
Anyone can understand how chess or baseball works, but to be a good player is another matter entirely.
We may come to believe there’s an incompatibility, but I don’t believe it’s innate within capitalism itself. I think it’s more so a byproduct of how it has been implemented so far combined with deep cultural hang ups. There’s no reason I can see that would make capitalism and compassion exclusive of each other.
I believe addiction and a lack of compassion largely come down to culture. Rejection and condemnation of psychological issues likely occurred long before financial systems influenced our decisions so strongly.
Edit: Sarah Chayes
In that sense, corruption is the process of a society developing towards capitalism, but using its pre-existing societal toolset of ad-hoc interpersonal arrangements, in all their messy complexity, rather than the established processes of societies with centuries-old institutional traditions of having 1 universal metric for everything (capital). As capitalism is based on inter-generational accumulation of wealth, corruption can only be resolved over generations as societies become more trusting of the rationalist paradigm.
In today's hypercompetitive, multinational world, capitalism is indeed the sole goal of society, to enable those who work to make massive amounts of money, to do more and more. Even China, a quite communistic country, has fully embraced capitalism in terms of it's international dealings.
The culture issues we have in the US are largely a result of the hyper-rich influencing things in such a way that work itself becomes such a pride point, that those who are unable to work in the framework that society provides are called lazy and worthless, even when those people may flourish under a system with different constraints. Forcing some people to work jobs they have zero passion for, instead of allowing them to have a basic security net such that they can seek their own path in this life, is cruel. I have ADHD and it has so far been physically impossible to focus on something that doesn't somehow "grip" my focus, and I don't really control what things do so. So the vast majority of work out there is not something I can do and be successful, as the additional mental effort to even come close to focusing drains every bit of my being and makes me absolutely dreadfully miserable. If this is the path of capitalism for myself and countless others, then it needs serious reform.
In those who become addicted, sure. But that's a small minority.
For most of us, something, whether it's good cognition, awareness, intention, or something else, apparently does defeat addiction.
Pretty much every addict I’ve spoken to about their addiction and personal matters (not a small number) has had terrible experiences in life. It’s almost guaranteed. Weird trauma, or a lack of something critical in early life. The brain begins to seek, it self medicates, it soothes, the feedback loop becomes unbearable. Like an itch you need to scratch, but each scratch ruins your life a little more. Even after you stop using, the itch is typically still there. Good luck not scratching it.
It might feel good to tell yourself us non-addicts are somehow superior, but I prefer to warn myself that I’m certainly not. If anything I admire a lot of these people for holding on. My life is comparatively effortless yet I still have a hard time with plenty. We’re on easy mode if you ask me (which I know, you didn’t).
Bottom line, addiction is arguably like a disease and you (fortunately) don’t have it.
I’m doing much better these days :) suboxone initially saved my life, then Buvidal injection made sure I’m here to stay.
I was trying to make a methodological argument: If you only look at addicts, your data will say that addiction is inevitable. You need to look at the whole population, to see that some get addicted, and most people don't.
Then you can figure out how the groups are different and start to understand the casualties. I'm sure this has been done, but I haven't heard much about results.
I think your trauma theory very likely is part of it.
I thought it was important to leave them something that they can reflect on, memories, thoughts, reasons, and an understanding of me in some ways and how they impacted on my life.
You can send emails 10 years into the future! :)
I don't know, maybe it's not better but I think I would feel better with a flash drive or something physical (which I would backup and replace every so often).
There have been a few comments on the long term accessibility of the account, like you mention. So I think it could be a good idea for me to look into doing a scheduled backup from gmail to a drive or other data storage option.
My purpose is similar, which is to only have it available to my loved ones after I die. I am hoping that whatever lessons I couldn't impart to them while I was alive, they could get from my writings.
I've also revealed to them that my journal exists so that they would know what to do when the time comes.
My journal is digital and it's spread across my computer, my phone, and on the cloud. I am planning to write a script to collect everything into one location to make it easier to go through it. I also plan to add a note to each family member, just in case they could not (or do not want to) read through the whole thing. I just hope I would still have the time to do all of this.
> My dad didn’t have a tidy ending. I won’t. And neither will you. Our lives will not be a slow positive upward slope before we die in our sleep surrounded by our loved ones.
——
> There's one thing that's real clear to me: No one dies with dignity
For the longest time I thought it wasn’t possible. I’d read Simone de Beauvoir’s Une mort très douce, where she chronicles her mother’s death, and the conclusion is more or less that even with a live well fulfilled we all end up raging against the dying of the light (a reference to Dylan Thomas). It sounded very reasonable to me. But now I know it does not have to be like that.
I have those files somewhere, I protect them, back them up, and move them dutifully when I migrate to a new box, but I never ever read through them.
So, YMMV.
I knew my dad had cancer but he was trying hard not to show it. Maybe he wanted to keep face in front of my brothers and I, to preserve the best image we had from him, a strong and strict paternal figure from outside but a loving father from inside. And still, I kept denying it, refusing to accept the evil that was eating away at him. I was that dumb introverted kid that had nothing but work to escape the reality.
I still remember his last look at me while I was heading back to college after visiting him. A look of pride and sorrow, as he knew what would happen in the next days. And for the first time in my life, I saw my dad shedding a tear as he was asking me to take care of my brother's future. It was discrete, but I noticed it, and I still wish I could slap the past me and stay with him in his final moments. This will be forever among the biggest regrets I have.
Spend time with your loved ones and make sure that time is well spent. Sometime you never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.
This is why you write. Not to be famous, not to be published. But so that you can leave something for the ones who loved you. So that you do not just become a fading memory. So that people knew you where here.
None of my ancestors (including my Dad) kept a journal, at least one that I can get my hands on. So I know absolutely nothing about them. And that feels like a huge, huge loss.
I try to explain to my kids the underlying life lesson that <my behaviour | their punishment> is trying to teach them. Don't leave it in a journal, leave it in their memories.
Not knowing how old your kids are, but they understand and can take on advice at an earlier age than you might expect. They may have tantrums about it, sure, but your explanations will stick with them, and consolidate the more explanations you give them.
Expecting kids to have common sense about cause and effect ("well, what did you think would happen?") is just so stupid in hindsight - they don't know because they haven't experienced anything with which to compare yet. I still occasionally make this mistake about my own expectations of their experience.
I think helping your kids to understand your reasons will give them a view into the real world in advance of having to enter it. Fore-warned is fore-armed.
One of the best things that's happened for my kids is having a cousin with learning difficulties. We (myself and my better half) have had to explain in great detail how their cousin's behaviour is as a result of the various defence mechanisms that are symptomatic of their learning difficulties and that 'not understanding' something as quickly as everyone else around you inevitably leads to frustration and anger and lashing out. It's not personal, it's their way of dealing with things, and as (generally) intelligent people, we need to have patience for that, whilst at the same time doing what we can to not spark her off, but also not accepting her behaviour if and when she does ignite.
We've had these conversations with the kids many, many times over the course of 7+ years, so it's not a one-shot deal by any means, but it has most certainly sunk in.
Parenting is ad-nauseum repeated effort, very slowly ratcheting up the level of detail of the world around them to match their level of growth and understanding. Don't underestimate what they're actually able to understand.
(I feel very strongly about this, potentially the most important topic in the world. They'll be running it one day, sow the right seeds.)
This may just coincide with the age bracket at which kids make friends and start spending increasing amounts of time with other people and therefore having 'outside' influence. The lesson being: set them up to know good / bad / appropriate / inappropriate by this time.
Allowing some time to involve yourself in their interests (which equates to their friends' interests), rather than forcing them to conform with your own interests, should keep you somewhat more relevant in their eyes. This is much easier said than done - I've struggled with this the whole time, but Minecraft was a great phase :)
Learn to laugh at what they find funny, just to connect. Look at it through their naive eyes rather than your own broken-by-the-world cynical life experience.
By disowning your own children, you're giving an advantage to other people's children (whose parents haven't disowned them)... Some of these kids are downright rotten.
I find it therapeutic to write things down.
The access information is printed on a sheet of paper somewhere and I will probably just print the whole thing one day.
I just write them down for myself. I should probably make them available to everyone somehow, I'm pretty sure many will find them interesting.
At least I do, rereading the really old stuff :D
Thank you for sharing man.
I have fond memories with him, but never felt I knew him well.
It is because of this I have kept a journal for the last decade, for my loved ones in case I would pass unexpectedly.
I wish my mom & dad kept a journal, but they hadn't, and now they live only in me & my brother's memories...
I should start my own journal.
Before my mother passed away, I was struggling with caring for her quite fiercely. She would talk about how she just got done writing a movie, or that she would see various "demons" in the corners of the room, etc. At first I didn't know any better other than to say "you've been here the whole time". I was trying to do my best but it was difficult. I'd walk outside on the porch to smoke a cigarette and before I could finish I'd hear her yelling like I'd been gone for hours.
Then, about a month before she passed, I was fortunate enough to have a few experiences with DMT. The first four or five were smaller trips, pleasurable and short, and the biggest one gave me exactly what I needed. The first two or three objective minutes of the experience felt more like 20-30 minutes internally. I had the most beautiful visual color overlays, and I felt like at that moment I understood everything about everything. Almost like the universe was just dumping information and knowledge into me, on a more subconscious level. I then had a really intense, pleasurable, almost orgasmic yet completely non-sexual vibration sensation. After this, my egotistical ass decided to try to play Guitar Hero of all things. Immediately the experience went into what I would call a "hyperslap". My time perception was suddenly yanked backwards and I felt forced through the exact path my eyes had taken while looking around the room during the initial part of the trip. It didn't seem to go back any further than the moment I ingested the DMT. But then I was pulled forwards to "now". This happened back and forth I have no idea how many times. My friend and tripsitter was preparing a bowl of cannabis for after I came down. I perceived hearing the weed breaking up several times, no idea how many. At one point I remember the loops slowed down to the point where I tried to stand up, and I knocked over a soda bottle sitting on the floor. I also perceived that bottle fall over multiple times throughout the experience. At one point the experience pulled me back to now and then things got really slow. I suddenly had a random thought about "hey, I've seen movies about dying and getting stuck in a loop, is it actually possible that happens?". So I asked out loud "am I dead?" My friend told me "you're more alive than you've ever been". This proceeded to kick off further time looping, and it kept speeding up. Eventually it turned into the inverse vibration from the early part of the trip, instead of being pleasurable it was absolutely dreadful and caused me to exclaim "I'm never doing this again" (spoiler: I've since had a few smaller DMT experiences but not another one quite as big).
The entire trip took about 45 minutes or so, when most DMT trips take 15-20 minutes. I did smoke a cigarette directly before consuming the DMT, so it's possible that had an MAOI-type effect, which will greatly prolong a DMT experience (and why ayahuasca is usually a 4-6 hour thing).
After my normal reality returned to me, I felt like I'd been completely mentally reborn. My ADHD seemed cured for the moment. I could direct my focus wherever I wanted, and didn't nearly have the problem I did before with any random thing involuntarily grabbing my focus. I also then perceived my mother's situation completely differently, and I truly believe she was experiencing a natural DMT experience of sorts.
One time she was telling me she was seeing demons in the corner of the room, and I told her to close her eyes and think about Jesus (she was quite religious, although I'm more naturalistic and spiritual especially since the above experience). I gave her a few seconds and I asked her what she saw. She told me beautiful colors and flowers. To me that is textbook DMT, thoughts directly influencing vision.
I was able to process her death without grief after my DMT experience. I was able to understand that it was ok that my mother's identity would cease to exist, because her consciousness was returning home to the universe.
Some people may say "oh, we have no proof that any of this is true, so therefore it's not". I agree with the first part of that statement but not the second. To me, the difference between classical organized religion and the beliefs I have adopted, is that the former tend to make people authoritative, while the latter only cause me to strongly desire to treat others with true kindness and understanding, to help ease their experience through this world and and make it more positive. I'm not necessarily saying everyone should try DMT, but I am saying that it needs to be heavily researched and studied. I feel like understanding more about all psychedelics will help us greatly in understanding things related to consciousness and death.